Nexsan Mixes Storage, Security

Nexsan Technologies has unveiled an appliance that offers storage, management and security in a single box.

Nexsan says its Assureon product is aimed at organizations that need to address issues such as regulatory compliance and information lifecycle management (ILM).

Assureon offers advanced encryption, authentication and data protection combined with lifecycle management, RAID hardware and content addressed storage (CAS) technology, along with seamless support for tape and optical. Nexsan says it's the first time all those features have been offered in a single, fully integrated networked storage system.

Nexsan marketing vice president Brendan Kinkade said Assureon is the equivalent of "a Decru box, NetApp's Snaplock and an EMC Centera all rolled into a single product."

Kinkade said Assureon can identify and dispose of individual files not only on its integrated disk storage, but also on offline media such as tape or optical. It stores only a single instance of an object or file.

"Assureon is vastly more efficient when it comes to storage resources," Kinkade told Enterprise Storage Forum. "It creates a unique file identifier for each object or file and stores only a single version of that file. ... This results in reduced costs for both storage and bandwidth across the board."

Jon Oltsik, senior analyst of information security at the Enterprise Strategy Group, said that in a recent ESG survey of 232 storage professionals, 42% of respondents said recent security breaches had made them assess storage security risks and implement technology countermeasures.

"This announcement demonstrates that Nexsan understands these critical requirements and is delivering intelligent solutions for long-term archiving, management and disposition," Oltsik said. "Companies looking to safely store and protect their organizations' data would be hard-pressed to find another integrated solution on the market today that satisfies all of these requirements in a more cost-effective manner."

Assureon also provides 256-bit AES encryption, authentication, tamper-proof time stamping, serialization and self-auditing, along with crypto-shredding of individual encryption keys to assure that destroyed information cannot be read.

Pricing starts at $4,500 to $12,000 per terabyte, and Nexsan says the system can scale from a few terabytes to multiple petabytes.